Talking to yourself

What is "new writing? It's a question being debated by literary associates and theatre-makers across the UK, many of whom realise that the old divisions are breaking down. As the Traverse's Orla O'Loughlin suggested last week, perhaps it's time to simply "let the work define itself", rather than try to label it.

Nonetheless, when it comes to the fringe, you could be forgiven for thinking that new writing in fact means the monologue. Even two-handers such as Dirty Great Love Story or I Heart Peterborough have their roots in the monologue form. Two out of the three of the five plays I've seen in the Old Vic New Voices season at the Underbelly have been monologues: Bitch Boxer and Strong Arm. Both are strong pieces of writing, as is Luke Barnes's powerful Bottleneck at the Pleasance, but after three weeks on the fringe I'm longing to see a play in which people talk to each other, and don't just conduct an internal monologue with themselves.

Eclectic, sometimes electric

I've talked before about the way Edinburgh allows you to curate your own mini-festival within the festivals. Like Shakespeare? Well, you can start with Shakespeare for Breakfast and work your way through the day taking in Custom/Practice's A Midsummer Night's Dream and ending up with Shit-Faced Shakespeare, a high concept show if ever there was one.

Assembly's superb South African season and the Polish season right across the festivals, have added to the sense of festivals within festivals as have venues such as Northern Stage at St Stephens (work made in the North of England) and Summerhall, with its eclectic mix of mostly performance-based European and UK work.

I love the way the fringe allows niche work to flourish: who would have thought that Edinburgh could throw up enough fans of the groundbreaking 1990s musical Rent (very much the Spring Awakening of its day) to sustain Anthony Rapp's memoir show Without You (at Underbelly until 26 August after which it moves to the Menier Chocolate Factory in London). Or that there is such a public taste for improvised mask comedy that Kevin Tomlinson's likeable Shakespeare-inspired Seven Ages can sell out every afternoon at Just the Tonic, or that a sell-out crowd would want to hear Polish company Song of the Goat's electric choral retelling of King Lear, which has become one of the most unlikely hits of the festival not least for the way it takes up residence in your guts and reverberates there.

One of the pleasures of being a critic on the fringe is that I get to move between all these different worlds and don't get stuck in any of them.

Final week blues

April may be the cruellest month, according to TS Eliot, but it is the end of August, which marks the end of the fringe, that cuts to the quick. On Tuesday, I stood in the rain by Underbelly as companies thrust flyers into my hand for shows, eager to the very end. Over the next few days, the last awards will be handed out and those with hit shows can expect to see a surge of ticket sales and increased interest from producers and promoters trying to tie up deals.

For the lucky few it is heady times. But for every sellout show there are dozens that will have struggled to get even a small audience, because as Tommy Sheppard, director of the Stand comedy club and the George Street Assembly Rooms, says in Mark Fisher's indispensable Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide, the fringe is "not a meritocracy. Your show could be really good, but that doesn't mean you're going to sell any tickets for it. That's one of the cruel things about the fringe."

Fisher's book gives many examples of those who crashed and burned on the fringe in their early outings, from comic Michael McIntyre to the theatre company 1927 (which went on to have a huge hit with Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea). Outside the Underbelly I asked one woman how her fringe had gone. "Horrible," she said stoically. "But I wouldn't have missed it." Me too. At this stage in the festival I feel as though I'm done on my knees. But the fringe is like childbirth. Often agony at the time, but it doesn't stop you from doing it again the following year.

Quote of the day

Woman to husband on spying acoustic shield around drummer in on-stage band at Anthony Rapp's Without You: "Why is the drummer in a glass cage? Has he got a contagious disease that the others don't want to catch?"